ABSTRACT
The 1964-1965 World’s Fair was the largest and most expensive fair ever conceived and created, but only days after the last fairgoer passed through the turnstile to leave most of the many structures that brought joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is still relatively empty. Due to the mass annihilation of the fairgrounds, there is a sense of longing that remains and the proposed project is meant to help fill that void.

Once something is destroyed it is difficult to then piece it together in a meaningful manner, but with the assistance of computational technology and the internet new approaches can be disseminated for a larger audience to experience, enjoy and gain a better understanding. This significant event of the City’s history deserves current interpretation and through a text-based game, a new audience can learn about the 1964-1965 World’s Fair and the age it was created in as well as allow an older generation to delve into the digital realm.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
Michelle A. McSweeney, CUNY, The Graduate Center (advisor)

Matthew K. Gold, CUNY, The Graduate Center (advisor)

Lisa Rhody, CUNY, The Graduate Center (consultant)

Kimon Keramidas, NYU (consultant)

CUNY, The Graduate Center Digital Fellows (support)

Queens Museum Staff (support)

NARRATIVE
ENHANCING THE HUMANITIES THROUGH INNOVATION
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park was the location of not only the 1964-1965 World’s Fair but the 1939-1940 World’s Fair, as well. However, for those who venture into the Park today may find it as barren as when the land was used as a dump for ash and garbage before the Fairs were even conceived. But relics remain from the two Fairs in various locations around the Park. Some are easy to identify such as the New York State Pavilion as referenced in the movie Men in Black and can be seen from miles away, while some are as small as plaques and not as noticeable or easy to find.

There is currently work underway to renovate the New York State Pavilion and the Pool of Reflections, which is a sign of the significance of the structures to the local community and the city at large. But what is next for the Park? Will Robert Moses’ dream of making the Park more popular than Central Park ever come true? Only time will tell.

The proposed project is an attempt to recreate the 1964-1965 World’s Fair for a new audience as well as to rekindle memories of the Fair for those who visited over 50 years ago. The project will utilize code to create a modern approach to historical experience with text-based gameplay. The steps to create the program, along with the code and resources to create it, will be made accessible online.

The platform will be free and open to the public to explore, play and learn. The player will be asked to choose from one of four avatars to utilize while they traverse through the 1964-1965 World’s Fair experience. The avatars will be a representation of individuals from archival footage and materials distributed by the Fair, which could possibly be a kid from the neighborhood who sneaked in through the fence to avoid the $1 fee, a young international couple, a family of four or five from the Midwest, and grandparents with their two grandchildren from Manhattan. The avatars will begin with different monetary values and with the time at 12:00 PM. As the avatar is navigated through the platform the money amount and the time diminishes. The game ends when the avatar is out of money or the time reaches 6:00 PM. The individual in control of the avatar will learn aspects of the Fair’s many pavilions, their exhibits, events that took place at the Fair and around that time, and other relevant information about the pavilion if it still exists within the Park or elsewhere after the Fair.

The game will be hosted on either a public URL or through the Queens Museum website. The Queens Museum is significant for this project due to the building’s history within the Park and as an established art museum and educational center. The structure was first built for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair as the New York City Pavilion, after the Fair, the building was temporarily used as the home of United Nations General Assembly from 1946-1950, before renovated for the 1964-1965 World’s Fair to be the New York City Pavilion, again. The building has been used as a museum since 1972.

The text-based game will be created with a combination of software platforms and procedures. Important dimensions of the game are the time and money aspect. The time could possibly run twice as fast or faster, so the gameplay is at a reasonable length – 30 to 45 minutes. The financial aspect will be different for each avatar and will only be a few dollars. Most of the pavilions were free to access during the Fair. Another aspect that may be out of the scope of the project is an ‘experience’ outcome or a simple point structure. This, again, maybe out of the scope of the project, but would be an important aspect due to the creation of a leaderboard among friends, family, coworkers or classmates.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCAN/DH CONTEXT
There are a few websites dedicated to the 1964-1965 World’s Fair, but there is not a gamification aspect of it. The sites are useful resources, but they do not demand the user’s participation to read through the sites many pages of content that a text-based game would entail. Text-based games have been created and played since shortly after the advent of the computer and they continue to be enjoyed to this day. A few of the possible software and tools to be utilized are Twine, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Python, JavaScript, and HTML.

WORK PLAN
The project will consist of three main phases: research, prototype design, and development.

The team will conduct research on important aspects of the Fair they wish to include in the game as well as technical and pedagogical approaches to text-based games already in use. In regards to the research component of the Fair, there are several valuable resources available to students within the City. The most important records of the Fair are the New York World’s Fair 1964-1965 Corporation records at the NYPL. The collection consists of 1523 boxes of materials dated from before and after the Fair, with the bulk from 1963-1965. The collection is broken down in a description and a container list that can be found at the following URL: http://archives.nypl.org/uploads/collection/pdf_finding_aid/nywf64.pdf. In addition to the collection at the Manuscripts and Archive Division, The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division have a small collection of maps of the Fair. One map that is of significance to the creation of the game is its Shell map. It informs of the average time the pavilions took to visit their exhibits and the average time it took to go from anywhere throughout the Fair. Newspaper and magazine articles written during the Fair’s two seasons will also be of importance. Other sources available to students are the numerous journals and books available on JSTOR, such as “The End of Innocence: The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair” by Lawrence R. Samuel. Also, a physical book at the Mina Rees Library that has been a valuable resource is “The 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair” by Bill Cotter and Bill Young. Another valuable source by Bill Young is the website he created of the Fair. The URL is http://www.nywf64.com/.

The design phase will include the implementation and organization of the storyline. The player will utilize an avatar to pass through various pavilions at the Fair. Due to the differences in avatars, gameplay will be unique for each of them. Important dimensions of the game are the time and money aspect. Additionally, some avatars will go through the game at a faster or slower length of time than others. Also, the avatars will have different monetary values established to them at the start of the game. Lastly, although this may be out of the scope of the project, to have a reward system in place to award the player at the end of the game. This addition to the project would allow for a leaderboard among friends, family, coworkers or classmates who play together or against one another. The points could be derived from each of the pavilions the avatar visits.

The development of the game will entail code and weaving the stories together in a meaningful and concise manner that would be logically accurate to the site and time of the Fair. The software program Twine could be very helpful in this regard.

STAFF
Outreach & Administration – create and maintain an online presence for the project and upkeep documentation online through GitHub or some other public repository of the steps, code, and resources.

Storyboard & Logo – create and maintain continuity of the story throughout the process and the creator of the logo.

Research & Design – maintain the historical accuracy of the Fair and work with storyboarder to work out aspects of the game to be coded.

Code & Distribution – create the code to run the game and ensure public accessibility after its creation.

ABSTRACT

Secondary-school digital humanists need a scholarly place to share their work and confront the challenges of the field together. This project aims ultimately to create a peer-reviewed, online journal—DH Juvenilia—solely dedicated to digital humanities (DH) pedagogy in grades 6 – 12. Such a space would promote elevated discourse, broaden access to well-critiqued and humanistic applications of technology, and provide a larger, interdisciplinary community for those working in the isolation of their classroom, department, school, or district. The journal would ultimately mirror the already fine model of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (JITP) which is geared toward a higher-education audience. (For the spring semester of DHUM 70002, the scope would be limited to the inaugural issue—a special edition of JITP.)  Like the JITP, this project would publish themed issues quarterly while maintaining on a rolling basis more frequent, short-form posts. The project would borrow the JITP’s open peer review process for issue articles (and post-publication review for short-form pieces), as well as its editorial sections highlighting lesson plans, step-by-step how-tos, reviews of new resources and conferences, reflections on failures, and explorations of classroom tools. Additionally, the project would include two features missing from the JITP: a section dedicated to considering issues of race and accessibility in the secondary-school DH classroom and a space featuring successful partnerships such as those between public and private schools or between schools and institutions such as local archives. To live up to the values espoused by those new sections, the project will actively seek diverse members for its board, reviewers, and contributors. Further, we will enlist editorial board members who are native Spanish speakers to review Spanish submissions and to translate published articles into Spanish—a small but important step toward greater globality.

 

STATEMENT OF INNOVATION

Currently, there is no defined online space or publication for digital humanists teaching grades 6 – 12, yet they outnumber their counterparts in higher education, and they were encouraged to experiment with digital technologies in the hands of their students far earlier. A journal dedicated to serious discussions of secondary-school humanities technology pedagogy will help practitioners recognize their place in the vertical field that feeds higher education, as well as in the horizontal field across geography and school systems throughout the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds. The journal would be the only space currently dedicated to technological issues of race and accessibility in the secondary-school humanities realm, and its editorial board would be built expressly to ensure that the team behind the journal had a range of personal experience with such issues.

 

STATEMENT OF HUMANITIES SIGNIFICANCE

Exciting and powerful applications of technology in the service of the secondary-school humanities classrooms have gotten lost in the recent clamor for STEM initiatives. In an age when humanity itself seems at peril, there has never been a greater need for collaborative, concerted thinking around how technology can enrich our ability to understand people, history, and culture. There is currently no dedicated space where librarians, historians, and teachers of arts and literature can share practice and move forward together as we pursue ways to employ new tools to help our students understand what it means to be human. More frightening still, as technology continues to develop at an exponential rate (and as facility with it is touted as a must-have professional skill), secondary-school educators are not being asked to think about how bias is replicated in and by that technology. Simply by its existence, this journal would reassert the creative and powerful vibrancy of the digital humanists working in 6 – 12 environments while challenging them to face head-on the colonial legacy often built in to the very tools they use to broaden student understanding.

 

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS

Patrick DeDauw, Managing Editor, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (advisor)

Matt Gold, Acting Director, M.A. Program in Digital Humanities & M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization, CUNY Graduate Center (advisor)

Michelle McSweeney, Visiting Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute and CUNY Graduate Center, and JITP Assignments Editor (advisor)

Angela Gibson, Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association (consultant)

Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor, Princeton University (consultant)

Kelly Hammond, student, CUNY Graduate Center (principal investigator)

Yolanda Martín, The Chapin School (Spanish translator)

Editorial developer

Web developer

CUNY Graduate Center Digital Fellows (support)

 

NARRATIVE

Enhancing the Humanities Through Innovation

As the modern fervor for STEM initiatives sweeps secondary-school funding and attention toward tech for tech’s sake, those innovating with technology in the study of literature, history, and arts are in need of community, public presence, and a philosophical touchstone. Like digital humanists in higher education, secondary-school DH practitioners are often siloed and scattered across departments and districts, and they may not even recognize that their work is part of a growing, global field. Harnessing that far-flung brilliance, sharpening it through peer review, and actively working to reach like-valued minds of radically different-lived experiences can push the boundaries of the field while building a stronger base of digital humanities students for college and university programs. Capturing this work is particularly essential to the broader humanities field, as secondary school teachers often have both greater license to experiment as well as a firmer grounding in pedagogy than their university counterparts. They are an untapped yet highly creative resource in the field, comfortable with failure and iteration in a way their higher-ed peers may not be. And, even without the occupational compulsion to publish, they are hungry to share their work, contributing to magazines, writing chapters of books, and creating their own blogs and podcasts.

 

Environmental Scan/DH Context

While there is no site or publication dedicated to scholarly discourse around digital humanities in the 6 – 12 classroom, there are myriad sites that offer limited slices of such a conversation. Perhaps the most recognized in the field is edutopia.org, the website launched in 2010 by filmmaker George Lucas’s educational foundation whose mission proclaims hopes of “transforming K-12 education so that all students can acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to thrive in their studies, careers, and adult lives.” Two of the site’s “six core learning strategies” connect to digital humanities philosophy: “technology integration” and “integrated studies.” But, users can browse blog posts only through single lenses such as those categories, grade level, or an area of study of which two are humanities realms—English Language Arts and literacy. The site’s blog posts are written by classroom teachers who receive private editorial feedback, but there is no peer review, no comments, no dialogue.

Lesser venerated sites, such as Creative Educator now in its twelfth year, offer similarly wide-ranging posts, including some DH-friendly categories such as “digital storytelling.” But Creative Educator is peppered with ads and promotes its own commercial offerings, such as professional development. Further, while some posts are made by authors or classroom teachers, others are by written by the editors themselves and some are unattributed altogether. Further, there is no transparency on the site or the parent site (Tech4Learning) that demonstrates any credentials or expertise in the field.

Secondary-school digital humanists, then, are left to forge their own paths for sharing their work. Some create their own blogs or sites, such as Jeremiah McCall’s Gaming the Past, which, while rich in pedagogical thinking around the digital humanities in secondary school, offers only one voice. Other teachers look to more diluted options such as submitting their work to educational publications focused on broader audiences or themes, such as the occasional technology edition of Independent School or Teachers & Writers magazines. Still others share their work at temporally and geographically bound conferences, as teachers from Manhattan’s Trevor Day School did in a panel discussion entitled “Digital Humanities in Middle and High School: Case Studies and Pedagogical Approaches” at the DH2018 conference—a forum not marketed to secondary schools. DH Juvenilia, by contrast, will plumb secondary school networks (from discipline specific organizations such as the National Council of Teachers of English to niche-specific organizations such as the National Association of Independent Schools) to allow teachers with compelling practices in digital humanities approaches in secondary school to connect with each other, to receive peer feedback, and to have an archived space to document the continued evolution of the growing field.

Bastions of the humanities, such as the Modern Language Association (MLA), have in recent years recognized the need to spend time and resources on innovative ideas in secondary schools. In the fall of 2018, the MLA held the “New Visions in for Humanities Teaching” conference, attempting to “bring together secondary school educators throughout the New York area to help establish a collective, concrete agenda for shaping the future of humanities teaching in secondary schools.” Both the keynote address by William Adams (senior fellow at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities) and the breakout sessions gave significant time to digital humanities projects and concerns. DH Juvenilia would provide digital space for that MLA-imagined future to be realized, but would dream far beyond the narrow limits of New York City.

Fortunately, the JITP has provided a shining example both of how such a space might be constructed and the high level of discourse it could generate. The JITP accepts occasional pieces about DH in secondary schools, but the journal is targeted toward a higher-ed audience, so the bulk of its fine offerings remain out of reach for teachers of younger students. DH Juvenilia would gather pedagogically exciting ideas sprung directly from secondary-school digital humanities and could address logistical challenges unique to its practitioners. For example, the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act adopted in 1998 radically affects middle-school technology use, as do parent concerns about screen time and social media throughout the teen years. Further, secondary school teachers are responsible for protecting students as they begin to create their own digital footprints without having reached biological adulthood—an issue less of a priority for teachers of undergraduates.

While other DH journals provide excellent models as well, the JITP is created and hosted in CUNY’s WordPress environment and shares staff with this project’s participant list, allowing the opportunity for direct partnership and coordinated stewardship.

In addition to providing for middle- and high-school educators what the JITP offers, DH Juvenilia would address head-on issues about race and accessibility. Diversity and inclusion have been significant topics in secondary education for the last two decades, yet, in Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin cautions, “While more institutions and people are outspoken against blatant racism, discriminatory practices are becoming more deeply embedded within the sociotechnical infrastructure of everyday life” (34). And, while groups such as the Postcolonial Digital Humanities community on the MLA Commons do grapple online with such issues, the conversation is eerily silent in secondary schools, especially private schools with the greatest access to resources.

Tackling issues of race and accessibility is all the more essential in consideration of the fact that secondary school is where students’ identities and senses of cultural norms are concretized. In addition, teachers of students in grades 6 – 12 guide kids when they form tech habit, so using technology to understand, serve, and create for humanity can intervene in the pattern of bias replication and technological carelessness endemic in the world of unmoderated, viral memes and ever more rapid hardware releases.

Perhaps more importantly, students themselves are clamoring for this level of debate, as young activists such as Greta Thunberg and Jaclyn Corin (co-founder of the March for Our Lives movement) make clear. The digital humanities brings to these students investigations that matter through means that captivate them. With the intent of nourishing their teachers, this project will hone craft and spread ideas about ways that digital humanities can empower students seeking social justice. As Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein have urged us in “A DH That Matters” (from Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2019), “We must therefore commit to making a digital humanities that matters beyond itself, one that probes the stakes and impacts of technology across a range of institutions and communities.” Making DH matter is even more essential for kids entering the digital space at the same time as they enter adolescence. This project will encourage thoughtful applications that in turn generate thoughtful experiences at this incredibly critical time in a child’s life.

Further, this project will broaden the very borders of the “big tent” of digital humanities. Already, powerful DH projects are thriving in sixth- to twelfth-grade classrooms: students are critiquing historically themed video games by digging into primary sources, building Scratch projects that experiment with poetic forms, “making over” data visualizations around social injustice, mapping the history and stories of their own neighborhoods, or literally giving voice to women of the past by creating dramatic recordings of letters from the 1770s to the 1940s tucked away in the archives. This project will give that work a public space and give its creators and the field a place to grow through peer review and the exchange of ideas.

 

Work plan

With the model of the JITP and its staff at hand, this project has a leg up from the start. We imagine the following timeline:

Step 1: Values and Vision (January – February)

With guidance from our seasoned consultants and advisors, we will commit to mission language, guidelines for articles and short-form pieces, criteria for peer reviewers, and accessibility protocols for the site as well as for submissions. (Though we intend to use CUNY-hosted WordPress as our platform, especially as we learn from and potentially partner with the JITP, we are eager to increase accessibility beyond the current model.) This stage includes research into secondary-school networks and publications that can reach a wide array of digital humanists in English- and Spanish-speaking schools around the globe.

 

Stage 2: Execution (March – April)

With a diverse team, we will build the architecture of the site with universal design as our philosophy. This stage includes confirming decisions about hosting and platform, as well as choosing layout and design. At this time, we will also solicit diverse contributors and reviewers for the pilot issue, to launch September of 2020.

 

Stage 3: Testing and Evaluation (May)

With the site designed, we will test it against our values and vision, with a range of audiences, including those with physical and attentional limitations as well as those from a range of identities and on a variety of devices and networks. In this stage we will be actively pursuing our blind spots—decisions that we made based on our own limited perspectives or technological ability.

 

Stage 4: Editorial Cultivation (June and July)

In this phase we will focus on making sure that our first issue is substantial, compelling, and well written. This phase is timed intentionally, as many secondary-school digital humanists in the northern and southern hemispheres have substantial (though seasonally inverted) breaks in the course of these months. During this time, our editors and peer reviewers will help shape the pieces that will set the tone for the site’s inauguration.

 

Stage 5: Staging and Launch (August and September)

As we populate the site with the articles from our first issue, we will doubtless find the need for additional changes to site layout or design. We will begin a pre-launch marketing campaign via the networks we addressed in early research, and will push our Twitter account to gather a following through which we can announce the later release of short-form pieces as well as new themes for upcoming issues. We will launch in late August or early September—the start of the school year for many northern hemisphere countries and the month after a long break for many of those in the southern hemisphere.

 

Staff

Patrick DeDauw, Managing Editor, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy (advisor)

Kelly Hammond, student, CUNY Graduate Center (principal investigator and managing editor)

Yolanda Martín, The Chapin School (Spanish translator)

Editorial developers (3)

Outreach manager

Web developers (2)

Accessibility manager (to push issues of universal design, accessibility, and sustainability)

 

Final Product and Dissemination

During the Vision and Values stage, we will research school networks in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, seeking avenues for reaching our audience beyond our own, more immediate spheres, such as the National Association for Independent Schools and Columbia University’s Teachers College. We will also tap into local expertise such as CUNY’s graduate program for Urban Education. Further, we will leverage our principal investigator’s recent work with the MLA and the JITP to broaden our reach through their sites and networks as well. We will take even further advantage of our staff’s partnerships with institutions such as New York’s Juilliard School of Music and Gilder-Lehrman Institute, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Washington’s Kennedy Center, Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center, and Chicago’s Historical Society to seek educators of a wide range of disciplines. We will conduct a pre-launch campaign through these networks. Submitters and peer reviewers will also do their part to share the launch with their peers and partnerships around the world.

In the iterative spirit of the digital humanities, we plan to recruit new editorial management every two years—especially important turnover as the field itself expands to accommodate new technologies and approaches and as we expand our understanding of what it means to be inclusive. We will actively seek asynchronous, low-bandwidth ways for the editorial team to meet and manage workflow, so that the editorial board can be increasingly international regardless of time zone and internet speed.

 

WORKS CITED

“About Us.” Edutopia, https://edutopia.org/about. Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Benjamin, Ruha. Race after Technology : Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.

“Creative Educator | A Creative Approach to Teaching.” Creative Educator, https://creativeeducator.tech4learning.com/ . Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

Digital Humanities in Middle and High School: Case Studies and Pedagogical Approaches-DH2018. https://dh2018.adho.org/en/digital-humanities-in-middle-and-high-school-case-studies-and-pedagogical-approaches/ . Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

“Gaming the Past.” Gaming the Past, https://gamingthepast.net/ . Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

“‘Introduction’ in ‘Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019’ on Manifold.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/0cd11777-7d1b-4f2c-8fdf-4704e827c2c2#intro . Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.

“MLA Conversations Series.” Modern Language Association, https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-Conversations-Series . Accessed 18 Dec. 2019.